Jayita Sarkar is Professor of Global History of Inequalities at the University of Glasgow's School of Social and Political Sciences. Her research and teaching areas are global and transnational histories of capitalism, infrastructures, and territoriality. She is the author of the award-winning book, Ploughshares and Swords. India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022).

This intervention examines the connections involving science, business, and empire in global nuclear histories. By focusing on Marie Curie’s ties with Belgian company, Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) to procure materials for her Radium Institutes in Paris and Warsaw from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Congo, this essay traces the proximity between scientists and industrialists making up the sinews of empire. It emphasizes the need for global histories of capitalism and science with an emphasis on extractivism in dependent spaces connected to nuclear fission.